Question

I have a remote_form which works 100%

When a user clicks submit, it goes out grabs so data from the db or data scraped from another website, and updates the page seamlessly…

The problem I’m having now, is that I’d like to do the same thing, but do it without having the user click the submit button with an onload event. I think I’m going about it the wrong way:

Technically this works… it does get the right data, but instead of doing exactly what the remote_form_tag does it returns the data raw. No RJS replace_html.

Is there a way to skip the form_for altogether and just execute the controller action directly when the page loads?

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(window).load(function() {
        // executes when HTML-Document is loaded and DOM is ready
        // jQuery.facebox('Big loading! <img alt=\"Loading\" src=\"/images/loaders/loading.gif\" />');
        //$("#update_form").submit();
        $("#update_form").submit(function () { return false; });

    });
</script>

The form for

#html.erb
<%  form_remote_tag :url => { :action => "update_availables", :id => params[:id] },
    :loading => "jQuery.facebox('Big loading! <img alt=\"Loading\" src=\"/images/loaders/loading.gif\" />');",
    :html => { :method => "get" },
    :method => "get",
    :html => { :id => 'update_form' } do %>

The controller

  def update_availables
    @do_it = Available.get_new_availables :id => params[:id], :date => user_cart.getDate.to_s
    get_availables

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.js
    end
  end

RJS

page.replace_html :rooms, :partial => "available"
page << "jQuery.facebox.close();"

Answer 1

Well, to get the same functionality as the user clicking the form you could use the javascript click method:

$(window).load(function() {

    $("#update_form input[type='submit']").click();

});

But, if you’re submitting without any input from the user, why put the data in a form at all, why not just put an ajax call in the load handler which calls the action and updates the code directly?

$(window).load(function() {

    $.ajax({
      type: "GET",
      url: "scraper_url",
      data: {field1:val,field2:val},
      success: function(responseText){
        // update page
      }
    });

});